I've noticed with the old Alice (2.0) and with 2.2 that on Vista the colour scheme gets switched to Vista Basic. I don't know what gets lost when that happens, or if it can be changed, but vista has been out a year now, even if the uptake is not as great as Microsoft hoped for. Maybe this is not fixable, or not worth the effort, but I thought it would be of some use to let you know.
Thank you.

For Alice objects, you can, of course, set either the RGB or the HSB value for a color instead of selecting one of the swatches - for opaque objects this "should" take care of any color differences between OS's.

Yes, that is what I think is happening. My point is that given the target users it would be good to get rid of this disconcerting [a little bit, perhaps] message. Perhaps that means building on vista. I'm still more familiar with Unix than Windows programming, so can't advise on how that might be done.

I think this discussion is about the look and feel of the window you are seeing. This has nothing to do with XP or Vista, but the way Alice was created. The version of Java that is used in Alice only have the XP look and feel, so all users will see the XP windows look.

I'm not sure exactly what is meant by the "XP windows look" - but Alice (and Java programs like Open Office, as well as several older games)) seem to default to whatever the current machine settings are for your graphics card. Since Vista uses a different version of the basic video graphics format than XP - the resulting display can look quite different with respect to both color and transparency.

I usually run Alice in XP compatibility mode, which seems to take care of most of the "problems" - a work-around that unfortunately doesn't work with at least one of my older games. With color, it's mainly a matter of taste - but with transparency, etc. the quality of the display can really start to look bad. Fortunately I haven't found that to be the case in Alice.

For Alice objects, you can, of course, set either the RGB or the HSB value for a color instead of selecting one of the swatches - for opaque objects this "should" take care of any color differences between OS's.